


Dark and Fearsome

by chantefable



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Anxiety, Codependency, Existential Angst, F/F, Gen, Romance, Separations, The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-07
Updated: 2010-10-07
Packaged: 2018-03-22 16:47:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3736303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chantefable/pseuds/chantefable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing is more dark and fearsome than love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark and Fearsome

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kelly_chambliss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kelly_chambliss/gifts).



> Written for Minerva Fest 2010.

Life is monotonous and austere, and I am aware of my own prison. Yet one cannot control the ebb and flow of one's thoughts: even when I step out in my garden, rich and lush and brimming with life, and raise my head to watch the tree branches twist and twirl and cover the sky above; even when, despite the cool air, my skin burns hot, aware of the rough tree trunks that stand close together, like the bars of a wild animal's cage; even then I cannot help recalling exactly what circumstances brought me to my current situation, a wife and a mother on the brink of a gruesome, revolting war.

Perhaps I like to torture myself. It would be a trait worthy of a Black.

When one's senses are dulled by the day-to-day rush of loathing that spills out of one's own soul and mouth; when one's heart is hardened by abiding by the rules that one detests with one's very core, yet forces oneself to observe with a rigour that could be mistaken for veneration – picking old wounds and watching them ooze fire and blood is nothing but a proof of life.

Minerva, of course, would disagree.

***

There is a thing that one always longs for, and I knew what it was before I knew many other things. Maybe this is how it began.

One yearns for the strange, lurid force that whispers on the edges of one's consciousness to creep in, to sweep over one's very being and overwhelm the self; yet one shudders at the thought of it razing down everything that makes one a person, for that is its true sweet, morbid power.

Nothing is more dark and fearsome than love.

***

Strange feelings are unwelcome no matter how much one longs for them. But chase away the strangeness, and it will return with a force so overwhelming it will wipe out all reason. It will settle in, heavy and thorough, and one day, it will not be the piercing intrusion of the strange – it will be the everyday rhythm of life and one's mundane self that will appear to be impossibly distorted and alien.

Minerva is different, so different from what I thought of her when I bothered to think of her at all. Hers is a double character, a duplicitous character: for Minerva, it is possible to be a reveller and an eccentric, a fighter and a dancer, fully submerged in curious dreams and sophisticated visions, rooted in the past and rushing into the future...

Getting to know her was like letting fire lick at one's fingertips: quick and tentative at the same time, a little bit whimsical, a little bit inevitable. Teasingly, misleadingly simple.

We both came from the same source, from the same way of life, but when it all began, we thought nothing of it. There was no time to think, really.

It was primal, and I cannot say whether it began in a single moment or spun itself over the course of hours, days, or seasons.

***

Maybe it began on a tingling morning in May, when we found ourselves by the lake, knee-deep in the cold, clinging water that made our bared calves sore and slick. We had tucked our heavy skirts up and walked through water, waiting for the prickling air to relieve us of our small, stifling thoughts of school.

I tilted my head and watched the slanted sunrays paint her cheeks and mouth with hazy gold, something improbably beautiful and therefore definitely real and magical. Her eyes were burning bright, her lips in a line that could have been a smile, a thick, glossy strand of auburn hair tucked behind her ear.

In that moment, I knew that we were on the cusp of something extraordinary, scalding, dangerous, something that one day would surely crack life itself in two.

It was dark, so very dark; darkness spreading under the sun, hot and heady with the promise of something devastating, something that would shell me and hollow me until there is nothing left of me at all. 

It was so very dark in my heart on that bright morning when she took my hand, and I thought to be afraid. 

But then she took my mouth, and I thought no more.

***

When love is new and strange, one is far too overwhelmed with being in love to notice what it does to one's self. It is like being caught in a perfect dream, where the sky is bright blue and enchanting and everything that one did not know one yearned for spins around in an endless loop of pleasure and promise.

When love is new and strange, one does not usually wake up and step aside, and watch it maul one's being in dark delight. But I did.

When one watches love's laborious attempts to demolish one's convictions, one does not usually keep loving.

But I did.

Minerva turned out to be different from what I thought of her, and then I thought that love would also prove to be different from what I knew and dreaded it to be.

Because it is Minerva.

Her name is not a game of chance. Minerva. Wise beauty and bawdy bravery.

The severe simplicity of life's principles ingrained in one's mind and in one's bones determines more than the pattern of one's life; it measures the pain that one is to bring to others. 

There is a simple, secret code to Minerva's mind, and she composes riddles in it; she uses them to try to shape me and to hurt me. Sometimes she succeeds. There must be a code to my mind, as well, and sometimes I suspect that she, in her crisp brilliance, has deciphered it, at least partly. She uses _that_ to shape me and to hurt me, as well.

If I believed in fairness, I would say that this is unfair.

It is not to be done, for what right does she have to teach me?

***

The world is haunted by horrible, ugly creatures. They are men, they are women. They are people.

They are everywhere.

Minerva does not know their kind, or rather, she pretends not to know it because it pleases her, because she believes that a simple offering is what will win me over. So she offers me simplicity: she paints a picture of bright colours and sharp contrasts, she gives everything a name, and she gives me her hand.

Not everything is simple. Not everything deserves to be named.

I know these people for what they are, and I will not be swayed into easy hate or blind trust, by her warm, gentle hand or by the fist of my fate.

I know these people. I know those who live as if they were kings, who breathe as if they were immortal, who think and do like destiny is theirs to command. They think they are their own masters.

They are wrong.

Their true masters are their vulgar interests and their ugly vices; they serve their weakness, subjecting everything and everyone to their own tawdriness and cruelty. They are puppets and puppeteers at the same time. Everything about them is fake and bawdy. They are monsters, real and strong, tenacious and invincible, and they wear their awful faces with pride: they are the people you know, the people you pass on the street, the people who teach you, the people who love you.

Your enemies. Your idols. Your friends. Your family.

Monsters are everywhere.

She thinks that they are _my_ people. I know that they are _her_ people as well.

Monsters are everywhere.

I begin to believe that she does not recognise them all.

We are surrounded by monsters. Disgusting monsters and stupid sheep, all of them, everywhere. One does not pick sides when one is at the bottom of a rotten well.

I will not be willingly blind to a half of the world just because it's the half she has claimed as hers.

I will not be what she wants me to be, even though I want to be her everything.

***

Maybe it will end one day. Maybe it never truly will.

Minerva told me that I was wrong, that there was an inherent goodness to some people ('What people?' I asked. 'The people that you choose to like?'), and that there was a path to goodness – and of course, she knew those who knew the path, those who would show it to the people. Minerva was with those who would bring change, and she was so radiant when she spoke of it with ferocious determination and sweet confidence.

Treacherous words, poisonous words.

The words are not enough.

I know that Minerva is not misguided – she irrevocably belongs to the vile, monstrous shepherds who will lead the vile, monstrous sheep down the gory, sunlit road to righteousness. She rejoices in it, and she will not hesitate. Minerva believes in the deceitful, flickering light.

But I know that all roads end in the dark.

***

When her hand rests in mine, I know that love brings panic, not peace.

They will crush her like an old man crushes a ripe strawberry in his toothless mouth. I tried to tell her that. 

I tried to tell her, but I stopped myself. What right do I have to even try? Love has never given anyone any rights. 

I understood that, and I stopped trying.

Love did not give Minerva any rights.

Perhaps it will take her a little time to understand that.

***

Minerva has spoken to me about her cause (or what she trusts will be her cause when the time comes); she has spoken to me about the people she relies upon (or the people who she is determined to rely upon in the future, the future which is both looming and evanescent in our harsh, crumbling times); she has shown me her choices. She is so precious and alive, so rich and resilient in her smooth determination; were she a thing to be possessed, I would crave her and obtain her and never share her with the world. But she is a person, larger-than-life in her haughtiness and inner fire; she is a person and I cannot own her.

Minerva is a person. A person who fills me with want and awe. And despite that – _because of that_ – I cannot side with her. The awesome, the desirable about her – those are the very things which are unacceptable to me: her rigid, arrogant beliefs, her special beauty that obliterates all other beauty in the world for me, her faith in careless, crass, unprecedented manipulation of law and magic.

I know there is a rift between us, not in terms of essence, but in terms of perception. We are very much alike; too alike. So alike that I know that what makes me desirable and frightening to her are the very same things: my arrogance, my beliefs, my faith in doing things the way they should be done. In essence, in being, we are alike. It is not a matter of what we are; it is a matter of what we do with ourselves. We live our lives too differently: that is the rift. 

And in times to come, the rift will grow larger still: Dumbledore and Grindelwald, Transfiguring the matter or Charming it into a different state, a black-and-white world that becomes brighter and angrier with every agonising second until there is nothing but stillness flooded by cold, righteous light – or eternal, ever-changing, many-coloured darkness. 

We are alike, Minerva McGonagall and Walburga Black, and it is this unquestionable likeness that will always make us oppose each other. I understand it; one day she will understand it as well.

In that dark, lurid, pulsing corner of my mind where there is nothing but her and my own selfish, blind desire to do her bidding, I want it to be quick and painless, I want Minerva to understand and let it go. I want her to get away from this unscathed, because slow caresses and kisses pressed against cold cheeks an hour before dawn cannot outweigh the suffering and disappointment. I yearn for her to understand and let me go, and maybe even forget and pretend that this was greater than the two of us, stronger and scarier than simply falling in love. It would be easier for her this way, and in that darkest corner of my mind, I want everything to be easy for Minerva.

But I am more than that, and with everything else that I am, I want it to be long and painful and awful, because the more Minerva suffers when we finally manage to tear ourselves apart, the stronger it will make her. The more it hurts her, the safer she will be – far away in her purposefully simplified, artificial world of backwards laws and happy endings. The more difficult and horrible our separation is, the more assured I will be that everything has truly ended. The deeper Minerva is wounded, the stronger her eventual conviction that I was right shall be.

I am kind to her that way, kinder than she has ever been to me. I want her to crawl and wail now so that she can stand proud and unyielding later. But she has never shown me any mercy, and I know that she will not; by the time it is all over, I will be stripped and hollow, clutching at the tatters of my pride and my world. Before we break apart, she will drain me and wear me down. And I will let her, aware of my madness, because I have let the madness set me ablaze.

But even for Minerva, I will not let it burn me down.

***

There was a moment when I doubted myself. Maybe it was the day when my engagement was to be announced, when my cheeks still flared with anger at my uncle and my mother and all the other foolish, monstrous people who pleaded with me to accept my cousin's proposal for their own petty, selfish gain, and then gleefully humiliated me when I finally accepted. My eyes ached with another sleepless night, and my fingers were numb when I stroked Minerva's cheek.

Minerva's voice was soft in my ear, her hands were hard on my shoulders, and for a moment, I doubted myself. I rested my forehead on Minerva's shoulder, deluding myself that I had been wrong, that there was no rift, that there was a future for us because there was a will.

She spoke to me, her voice low and urgent, cracking through my consciousness like a whip. She said that it was a matter of one choice, one small choice; she said I simply had to feel the way she does, and the rest would come, the rest would not mean anything it does now. 

I sighed against the freckled skin of Minerva's bare shoulder, letting words of _feelings_ , those other feelings which are sharp and lucid like the sound of a lute string in the early morning, wash over me and lull me into a ragged, dull trance.

Minerva spoke of how those who are brave and confident, fierce and chaotic, feel the beat of life. She said that I had willingly made myself dry and callous, incapable of hot feeling. She asked me to do it. She told me to try.

I said I did not know how.

She said that there were ways to learn.

And in my strange trance, in that secret place between being born and dying when one takes the time to live, I saw the ways. I saw the roads.

I see them even now, when I close my eyes against the cold black of the night.

There are two roads in front of me, on my quest to discover those feelings that she claims are so exceptional and so complex, those mundane mysteries that I apparently do not know.

One road is through the rare and the bizarre which, timeless and sly, mocks me with the masks of deception that shall litter my way to the tender truth that she doubtless wants me to taste. She wants me to _feel_ , feel in the same easy way that she does, to feel the same blazing feelings that she does. Minerva feels to understand, living through the things she moulds, living through the states of everything she Transfigures. She wants me to feel that, she wants me to change, to alter myself with the same blinding certainty that she does. Minerva enjoys it, no doubt; she enjoys the constant slide and shift of shapes and situations. She is empowered by the change she produces. The more drastic the changes, the hotter her pleasure.

So how could I walk down the road that taunts me with the robes of a rogue and a liar that I would be forced to wear? Not only would I pretend to be something which I am not, something which I do not wish to be and do not choose to tolerate in and of itself; I would also be forced to _pretend_ , something which is deeply abhorrent and repulsive to me. I will not imitate. I will not emulate. And as if these two offenses were not enough, there is a third, and that one hurts me most deeply: she invites me to walk down that road, she urges me to make that choice, to seek her selfish pleasure in altering my worldview and luring me to her side in her deceptively simple, black and white universe. I would be nothing but her grey shadow there, and I would waste away.

The other road is through the familiar and the known which, heinous in their cherished glory, would need to be crushed and destroyed. Every blow would be delivered with my own bleeding hand, with my own bruised fist. I would need to rebel against myself, to refuse and reject not only everything that is my own, but also everything that is _me_. She wants me to break open my body and rip out my own bone. Minerva wants me to end myself so that I can begin with her. This is the road where I am my own judge and executioner, abiding by her twisted makeshift law of a joyful future. This is the road where I have to gleefully ruin myself; the road where I let the monsters I loathe feast on my flesh and stomp on my shredded skin. The road where I hurt myself until I hate myself, where I become a traitor and a pariah to everyone, with nothing but her promise of loyalty to believe in.

She wants me to smash my supposed cage with my own living bone, my living bone with my living flesh still clinging to it!

So how can I choose to believe her if her joy means my own peril?

I stand on the crossroads, no map and no sign to guide me, the stars above mute and unblinking, stern like Minerva is. And all I know, all I really _feel_ , is that underneath her fervour and ambition, she, too, is dry like eternity. Dry like the desert.

Dry like my eyes.

So what's the point?

***

Life is monotonous and austere, and I am aware of my own prison. Yet one cannot control the ebb and flow of one's thoughts: even when I stand in the epicentre of the whirlwind of life, even when deaths and betrayals and vows and alliances swirl around me with the speed of lightning, thrumming with cold hatred and slick, slimy want, I cannot help thinking that there had never been any other way for me to live my life, for although I have loved and have been loved, it is never enough.

So I close my eyes and I remember the cool of the water against my calves, and hot, dry kisses pressed against the nape of my neck.

Fire in my heart, fire in my past.

Taste of coal in my mouth.


End file.
